The conference hopes to broaden the scope of American literature, opening it to more complex geographies, and to a variety of genres and media. The impetus comes partly from a survey of what is currently in the field: it is impossible to read the work of Junot Diaz and Edwidge Danticat, Robert Hass and Jorie Graham, Dave Eggers and Jhumpa Lahiri without seeing that, for all these authors, the reference frame is no longer simply the United States, but a larger, looser, more contextually varied set of coordinates, populated by laboring bodies, migrating faiths, generational sagas, memories of war, as well as the accents of unforgotten tongues, the taste and smell of beloved foods and spices.

The 2017 International Conference on Narrative will be sponsored by the University of Kentucky and held at the Downtown Hilton in Lexington, Kentucky, March 23-26. We welcome proposals for papers and panels on all aspects of narrative in any genre, period, discipline, language, and medium. Deadline for receipt of proposals: October 15, 2016.

American comics have a long and checkered history in the way they have portrayed racial difference, though more recent comics/graphic novels have used the medium to comment effectively on American racial politics. As the genre grows in popularity in bookstores and on college campuses, now seems an opportune time to take stock of the ways this medium has both fostered and critiqued racist attitudes. This panel welcomes submissions on this topic from any era of American comics/ graphic novels and from any literary critical or cultural studies perspective.